Funny that you mention madden - https://www.thegamer.com/madden-19-banner-in-madden-20/
Proves my point really - there's virtually no difference between versions that for all intents and purposes it might as well be the same game. Shows that logically there's absolutely no point to get the so called "latest and greatest" when in reality it's just the same thing.
As for piracy in on itself, while it's easy to see them as "another drop in the bucket", there are instances where crackers for example actually got arrested
https://www.engadget.com/2018-07-26-notorious-denuvo-gaming-cracker-voksi-arrested-bulgaria.html
It's not dime a dozen mind you, but there's certainly a possibility. Some people would rather avoid that possiblity outright.
Not only that. Simply sharing n-0 data left and right might not get anyone C&D or something, but then what might we get instead is increased protection. On PC games, Denuvo is the most popular one. On arcades, we might have custom protections and the like. I believe that some arcade games had quite a strong protection (IGS and Andamiro stuff IIRC, correct me if I'm wrong).
After all, we don't want arcade games to be protected so hard we can't play it anywhere else, do we?